Barclays Hackathon: Fighting for the Future of Banking
As part of ‘Rise Hackathon: Episode II – The Bank Awakens’, 547 teams and 1,045 participants competed over a 36-hour period in Mumbai, India and Manchester, England.
Facing future challenges
The aim was to create innovative solutions in response to three distinct challenges that banks are set to face. The hackathon’s first ‘mission’ focused on the introduction of the Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) – a new (and potentially disruptive) European banking regulation coming into force in 2018. The other missions looked at new ways of managing risk in corporate treasury, and the challenge of reacting to how people consume banking services with the emergence of ‘zero UI’ (the concept of removing barriers between users and interfaces).
The six winning teams – who received cash prizes and the chance to develop their prototypes with help from Barclays – included Baringa Partners, a cashflow forecasting and intelligent decisioning tool, and CodeForce, a financial aggregation marketplace.
Michael Harte, Barclays Head of Group Innovation said: “Hackathons allow us to dynamically collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the global fintech start-up communities around the world.
“It’s about our staff co-creating solutions with external teams; coming together for 36 hours to work on specific customer and business solutions – an intense burst of idea storming and experimental hacks to build innovative prototypes and minimum viable products or features for customers.”
The hackathon was the first time the bank had realeased its APIs (application programming interfaces) to external developers via its API store.
Peter Josse, CIO for Barclays UK said: “We understand the critical importance of digital and data and the role they’re playing in reshaping the financial services industry. We’re passionate about leading the way for open banking and providing our customers and clients with secure, resilient next gen products and services.”
Google, Twitter, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft were among the bank’s 20 partners for the hackathon, which took place in September at Rise Manchester and the Bombay Stock Exchange, Mumbai.
Rise – a global network of open innovation hubs established by Barclays – brings together start-ups and industry leaders who are working to create the future of financial services.
Read our Hackathon diary: 36 hours, 1,045 developers and a whole lot of pizza
